Steve Buyer Quotes

I get really excited imagining what we can do in the future with broadband.

Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn't have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They're going to adopt e-books much faster than we do.

We covered every major segment of this broadband communications world.

If you look at the major industries of the future, IT and mobile are way up there.

Equipped with two cell phones - one for work and another for home - I like to think of myself as a kind of 21st-century digital pioneer, ready to network, fax, page, e-mail and - oh, yes - talk at will.

With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense.

In the 20th century, we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive. At the end of that century, we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the Internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds.

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

We are gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy I had ventured to make four years ago, of a time when, if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a very loud electromagnetic voice, heard by him who had the electromagnetic ear, silent to him who had it not. “Where are you? ” he would say. A small reply would come, “I am at the bottom of a coalmine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Atlantic.” Or, perhaps in spite of all the calling, no reply would come, and the person would then know that his friend was dead. Think of what this would mean ... a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws.

The value that SoftBank saw in us was that we are a technology company in the mobile Internet space.

The mobile phone is not a toy; it's a device that uses radio waves.

I'm so tired of cell phones.

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.

We have been through four and five generations of technology since the PATRIOT Act.

Cell phones are so convenient that they're an inconvenience.

The projector will soon disappear. The camera, not really. OK, it depends... it depends on change.

Every generation is more influenced by technology, which is always changing faster.

Technology transforms people's lives. From mitigating poverty to simplifying processes, ending corruption to providing better services, Technology is omnipresent. It has become the single-most important instrument of human progress.

Technology has such an impact on libraries in the last 20 years, and the last 10 years in particular.

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.

The book is here to stay. What we're doing is symbolic of the peaceful coexistence of the book and the computer.

Today, almost all-current technologies put the speed of light to work.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.

Most science fiction is about tomorrow, a tomorrow brought to you by innovations in science and technology, and China was worried that if they just have everybody learning what is, they're not going to be in a position to invent a tomorrow because their brain isn't even wired to go in that direction.

Technology is going to transform people's lives and society everywhere in the world. I spend most of my time studying new technologies. My main task is to understand what's going on and try to see where we can fit in.